In short, Adrian Thompson wanted to “evolve” a circuit (using reprogrammable hardware) that distinguishes between two “tones”. He set an “impossible” for human designers limit: use only 100 logical gates (supposedly “traditional” human methods on solving this would take 10-100 times more gates). The result? The evolution came up with a solution using only 32 cells, and of them 5 didn’t appear to affect the output. Strangely though, when these were removed, the circuit wasn’t working anymore. Evolution came up with a solution that worked on intricate effects in this particular piece of hardware, but it still worked.